Monthly Archives: December 2006

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MTV’s Stephen Totilo mailed me about this some days ago, but I didn’t get to it – he got the first on-camera English language interview with Kenta Cho of ABA Games, which you can see here, if you can navigate the labyrinthian site. Just scroll to the bottom, and you should be able to find the link. If anyone knows a ninja way of direct linking it, drop me a line. Stephen does really good work, I just wish it were in a place that was conducive to reading (note to MTV: Give him a blog).

Well, I thought it was a joke, but it isn’t. Koei and Bandai Namco are teaming up to create Gundam Musou – a Dynasty Warriors-like Gundam game for PS3. The press release confirms it. Given Bamco’s recent track record with Gundam games, maybe this will be a good thing, comparatively – Koei is doing the development, and Bandai Namco is publishing. The far future meets the far past. Very weird. This is pretty much assured a U.S. release.

Ys Origin is out now for PCs, so the curious should go grab it. Trailers, wallpapers, and game music can be found here, and Game Watch has a review. The game comes in a giant box, of course, this time with a 120 page color booklet.

RSF has put up a new flash video, though it passed under my radar for some time (in fact, he’s due for a new one). This one’s shorter than many of his earlier works (hint: use this link to see Super Mario Underworld once he updates his frontpage), such as Michael Fantasy and Sega Fantasy IV. Anyway, Super Mario Underworld is an epic battle between the Mario and Luigi (or something? maybe?) set in the Super Mario World universe. As usual, it’s epic and awesome, though the song has lyrics this time, featuring someone who probably didn’t get very good grades in English. It’s apparently a psuedo-parody of this flash video, which appeared at flash★bomb ’05, a japanese flash animation event. Looks like they didn’t do it again in 2006, unfortunately.

Keeping the Master System cavalcade coming today, check out alex-kidd.com, a site devoted to, what else, the Alex Kidd series for SMS. There’s an incredible level of detail here, with maps for almost each game, manuals and boxes from multiple regions, as well as music and video tabs which I assume will get some content later. The main attraction is the maps, which while unnecessary, as it’s not a super complicated game, look very very nice. Thanks to frank for pointing it out.

SMS Power has put up a new version of Phantasy Star for SMS, featuring a script reworked by TheRedEye, aka frank cifaldi, aka Gamasutra features editor, Lostlevels.org guy and insert credit sometimes writer person. He says the script ‘really needed’ to be redone, so there you go. Plus this is the english version of the original Japanese one, which had a special sound chip, making the music much improved when compared to the original (official) english localization.

The guy in charge of the project was about to rename Dark Force as Dark Phallus, because he thought that’s how the original kana read. I’m…pretty glad he decided not to go with that.

Update: christian nutt of Games Radar tells me that there’s official sega backup for “dark phallus,” in an art book he has. In english no less! So that’s a bit unfortunate. And indeed, in PSIV, there is a normal enemy called ‘prophallus’, which is a different version of the same boss from PSI. One wonders if they knew what ‘phallus’ means? If so, I blame rieko kodama. Sounds like something a girl would design as a final boss.

KOF XII is coming to US arcades on january 31, according to Coinop Express. Just try not to read their product description too closely, it might hurt your brain. Guess we’ll soon see what SNK can do on the Taito Type-X 2…

Update! So, well…I posted this quickly, and didn’t check thoroughly enough. I thought that logo looked familiar – they’ve just taken the KOF XI logo and added another I. This is the actual logo. So this whole thing may be bogus – did april fools day come a bit early this year? Looks like they removed the reference as well, so there we are!

Posted in Museum, News | Comments Off on News: King of Fighters XII coming soon (!?)

Gamasutra has a WOOMB.net interview up – those are the people who are localizing MSX games into english. The interview is here, though the author didn’t ask my #1 question, which is what’s up with the idiotic sounding company name? Even MSXtreme would be better, and that’s pretty bad. Apparently the company plans to release games at a quicker pace this coming year, and they just released Hydlide 3 from T&E Soft, as well as Zanax EX. It’s an interesting thing they’re doing, but I’d be surprised if they sold more than three copies of any given game, unless they wind up hooking up with Gametap or something.

ZPC was an old doom-like PC (and mac) game that got pretty poor reviews, but had great visual style, thanks to Aidan Hughes’ art (famous for his KMFDM covers). So if the game was crap (haven’t played it, can’t really say), the visual style was impressive. Even the blocky graphics, which were a complaint for many at the time, look amazingly stylish now. The music pretty decent, but people seem to have thought it was unplayably bad back then.

Conveniently, UnderGroundGamers has put up all of the game’s cutscenes, which are really interesting to watch, I think. Not only the visual style, but the action and direction of them. It really holds up for being over 10 years old. Definitely give it a look.

UnderGroundGamers is also the group that brought us the 60 Tattoo Assassins fatalities, as linked by kotaku recently. The game reportedly had over 2,000 of them, and they’re all ridiculous (Whistler’s Mother? Come on now…), but I’m linking it because of the multiple Burger Time references. It was a Data East property, so they could do that. So there’s the anthropomorphic hot dog for one, but also the more blatant reference to the right. This also means Tattoo Assassins are ripe for the plucking, should SNK choose to feature them in an upcoming game.